Chris I just finished my 23rd out of 24 books to hit my reading goal for the year 2024.
You can catch up with what I’ve been reading on the Bookshelf page of this website.
I’ve mentioned it previously, but shelved the book called “S.” by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst until now. It’s a doozy and requires a lot of time to read/process. Now is the time and I can’t think of a better book to hit my end goal.
I’ll not stop after this one of course.
Relocating to Florida has introduced me to a wide variety of new sights and sounds. This area is rich with diverse animals and birds from all over the place.
Recently I discovered an app from Cornell called “Merlin Bird ID”, that allows you to record bird calls and helps you identify what you are hearing. You can also upload an image of the bird you just captured to identify as well.
I’ve captured 15 species so far including osprey, burrowing owls, great horned owls, egrets, black-crowned night herons, ibis and more.
Each bird listed in the app will give you a synopsis of the species that includes other user’s audio recordings. I like to play them at full blast for the birds around me by way of communicating. It’s probably gibberish to them, but may be enough to draw them closer just out of their curiosity. I need some binoculars!
Cape Coral is home to a whole parliament of burrowing owls and the community goes out of their way to protect and care for them by placing signs and even wood perches for the owls next to their hollowed out homes in the ground. Eventually, I’ll convince T to do the same here at the house. That way I can set up a remote, wireless trail cam to view them any time and not disturb the owls.
It is no bad thing to
celebrate a simple life.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I just received a gift in the form of this fantastic 35mm film camera. I already own its brother, the Pentax K1000, and am familiar with the settings. I’m wondering what differences in the two could be.
It came preloaded with film but I’m not sure what film stock is in it. As always, it will be a treat to discover once it is developed.
For my part, I plan to use for my first stock choice either the lovely Lomography Metrochrome color or the Ilford HP5 black and white film.
Now it’s time to shoot those 36 exposures!
After a two hour delay, the Space-X Falcon launched at 5:23am from Kennedy Space Center carrying four civilian crew members into the highest orbit ever. There, they will perform some of the longest EVA tests. Again, as civilians- impressive.
With my sleep now ruined, I’ll publish this and try to grab a little more.
That’s how many pages I need to print from 24 years worth of writing on this website. Printing them from the library and over time may be my best bet I think. Let them worry about the paper and ink costs.
As a follow-up to my previous post, I realized that my audio file host had removed the embedded code and URL link from my Podcast page here on this site. Not very nice!
So I have uploaded the audio files, all 10.5 episodes, back to the Podcast page for posterity. In addition, I now have the files on my server for safekeeping.
Podcast Page Screenshot
I own my publishing house. This website, my own e-mail, the domain name, file servers, etc. I’ve learned the hard way not to trust third party anything.
You can catch up on previous episodes on the Podcast page.
What am I doing? Why did I start an online course when my brain is already overwhelmed with these other self-inflicted endeavors?
Fortunately our brains have the ability to change, grow and reorganize its neuron pathways to make new connections and remap from how it previously functioned.
Does this explain why my head hurts right now?
Did I just enroll into a distance-learning course from Harvard at the last moment? Verification complete- the course starts today, September 5th.
Welcome!
Introduction to Digital Humanities will orient and train you in a wide variety of digital tools and techniques that allow humanists and social scientists to ask new research and teaching questions and make new claims using data.
The course will teach you:
- What the term “digital humanities” means in different disciplines.
- How common digital tools work and examples of projects using them.
- How various file types can be used to create, gather, and organize data.
- How to use command-line functions to analyze text.
- How to use free tools to create visual text analysis.
I did the same thing nine years ago when enrolling for courses at Stanford. What have I done? What I always do: I am doing it because it stimulates my brain and I enjoy it.
Once again, I find myself working behind the scenes of this website. This time, I am organizing the backend, the stuff that no one else sees. I am also wrapping up the migration of writings from my previous sites into here for posterity. Such as it is.
It’s been fun to look back and see the previous designs of this site in all of its iterations. I’ve learned a lot, experimented quite a bit, and still have a ways to go. Nowadays, I care more about substance than style and will make an effort to keep the experiments to a minimum. Until then, here are a few screenshots of this site through the years. I wish I could have done the same during the early years.
With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.
The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.
I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.
